100 days of LinkedIn Games: reflections, stats and a bonus puzzle

Welcome to Gametime, a weekly newsletter recapping the past week of games on LinkedIn, what’s new in the puzzles space, and more — brought to you by LinkedIn Games Editor Paolo Pasco. Click 'Subscribe' to join the community and be notified of future editions.

Earlier this week, all the LinkedIn Games hit their 100th editions. This means we’ve released new puzzles for 100 days, and we’re grateful to everyone who’s solved along with us. On this milestone, I’d like to take a walk down memory lane, and point out notable puzzles from the run:

• 5/6/24: Pinpoint #6, types of fish (“Gold,” “Angel,” “Sword,” “Blue,” “Cat”): This puzzle is likely the hardest Pinpoint we’ve run so far, with a solve rate of 15%. It’s interesting to look back at the early puzzles, especially since solvers weren’t as used to our tricks as they are now — this was only the second Pinpoint ever that depended on words that follow/precede other words to complete phrases.
• 5/29/24: Crossclimb #29, ending with LADY/GAGA: This one has a long story. It was in one of the first batches of Crossclimbs I made, and the original draft went something like “LADY → LADS → LAGS → SAGS → SAGE → SAGA → GAGA.” However, testers pointed out that the SAGE/SAGA rungs could be swapped and still form a valid word ladder. Oops! I made sure to look for ambiguous ladders in the future, then rewrote the LADY/GAGA puzzle to have only one valid ordering. After its troubled history, I was just glad to see it out in the world.
• 6/2/24 and 6/3/24: Queens #33 and #34: These puzzles made up the subtlest Easter egg I’ve seen in Queens; I even didn’t notice it until just now, looking through past puzzles. The behind-the-scenes titles given to these were “Star” (pictured below, left) and “Stripes” (below, right), just in time for Independence Day in the U.S.!

• 6/8/24: Queens #39: This puzzle sticks in my mind as being one of the most elegant constructions. The puzzle appears to be divided into two 5x5 mini puzzles in the northwest and southeast corners, so you might think you can start by solving each of the mini puzzles independently. This strategy works fine for the upper-left mini puzzle, but if you try it on the southeast puzzle, you run into a problem: there are two solutions for that 5x5 puzzle (as an exercise, try finding both of them yourself!) The only way to find the correct solution of the two is to realize the center square in the gray section must have a Queen. This rules out one of the two solutions for the southeast puzzle, and allows you to solve the puzzle.

• 7/26/24: Crossclimb #87, ending with DEAD/POOL: Any puzzle that gets noticed by Ryan Reynolds is a notable one. I don’t make the rules. Coincidentally, the Crossclimb puzzle two days later had the word BLADE at the end. I don’t know why I’m mentioning this, but it’d be wild if that were to somehow be relevant to the latest Deadpool movie.

I also have a bonus game, based on Pinpoint data. When I’m looking at Pinpoint guesses, the most common guesses are usually the most obvious guesses related to the first clue (for example, when the first clue was “Line,” the three most common guesses were “fishing,” “straight,” and “geometry”). So, I’m going to give you snippets of the most common Pinpoint guesses on a certain day. Using those snippets, can you figure out what the first clue was?

1. rings, paper, wood, nature, family
2. stone, citrus, fruit, green, sour
3. eye, weather, wind, storm, disaster
4. ear, tools, blacksmith, hit, metal
5. remote, house, base, run, alone

Answers will be posted in the comments on Monday. Thanks for sticking with us for 100 puzzles, however long you’ve been solving. Here’s to a hundred more!

?? Pinpoint: The streak of four puzzles from Thursday, August 1 to Sunday, August 4 all played much harder than usual. Let’s look at the categories:

• Words that come after “golden” (Age, Rule, Gate, Parachute, Retriever)
• Things you can roll (Sushi, Dice, Bowling ball, Eyes, The letter “R”)
• Terms that come after “happy” (Medium, Hour, Meal, Camper, Go-lucky)
• Things that can get wrapped (Car, Present, Text in Excel, Burrito fillings, Spotify at the end of the year)

The solve rates for these all hovered around 60%, which is relatively low. We can see some patterns in the puzzles that play harder: “words that precede/follow [x]” categories have always been tough, as well as “things that can [x].” I have a few tips to help with these hard ones — you can generally spot a word-based puzzle, since the clues will likely all be common nouns. If they don’t have any obvious connection, try thinking about common phrases that use some of those words. Later clues are intended to be more helpful, so start with those and work your way up — ”retriever,” for example, is most commonly used in the phrase “golden retriever,” so if you think of that, you can check that “golden age,” “golden rule,” etc. are all phrases.

Also, shoutout to coworker Sohyung Kang for inspiring the “wrapped” puzzle — it was a fun stumper!

Play today’s Pinpoint?

?? Crossclimb: The Sunday, August 4 puzzle ending in a body part on a dragon, and what a dragon breathes (WING/FIRE) was easier than usual for a weekend puzzle (maybe dragons were top of mind for those waiting for that day’s House of the Dragon season 2 finale?). The solve time was even faster than that for the next Monday, which is typically the easiest of the week (1:28 on Sunday, 1:34 on Monday).?

We haven’t seen alternate ending words in a while, but many solvers reported a very compelling case on the Wednesday, August 7 puzzle ending in a feature of the outside of an apple, and a feature of the inside of an apple (SKIN/SEED). That day, many of the comments talked about how they answered SKIN/STEM instead.

Hope this didn’t trip people up for too long! Luckily, STEMs are pretty solidly on the outside of an apple, so that should be a cue to look for an alternate answer. Also, on the subject of this puzzle: not every puzzle is inspired by “brat,” but this song was running through my head. Inspiration can strike from any source!

Play today’s Crossclimb?

?? Queens: The easiest puzzle of the week was the Monday, August 5 puzzle, which came in at a relatively small 7x7 size. The average solve time was the lowest we’ve seen all month, at 1 minute 6 seconds. Will we see a sub-minute time in the near future? If solvers keep getting better, it’s only a matter of time…

Queens solvers got a treat on our 100th day: a jumbo-sized puzzle (11x11, the largest size we’ve had so far) with a big “100” across the top.

This puzzle, true to its expanded size, played much harder than the average, with a solve rate of 72.5% and average solve time of 7 minutes 53 seconds.?

Play today’s Queens

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WEIGH IN

This week’s topic: Battle of the streaks

I’m a creature of habit, so I like keeping a streak going. I’ve developed a daily rhythm for my Queens playing (after much experimentation, I’ve found that I’m slower when I play right after I wake up, so I tend to “lock in” after lunch). Still, my streaks are nothing to write home about — since I write the Pinpoint and Crossclimb, I don’t get much out of playing them, and my Queens streak is at 79 days, well short of Centurion status. If there are people who’ve hit the 100-puzzle mark, comment below! I’d love to see who’s been playing from day one.?

I do want to shout out one of our engineers who, due to a loophole, will always have a streak that’s one day longer than should be possible.

What game has your longest LinkedIn Games streak?

Share your thoughts in the comments below??

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